"I just wanted to say hello."
"Hello. Were we a success? How did Alice Carroll turn out to be?"
"Unenthusiastic. She's decided she likes me better the way I was."
"She can keep her hands off. Or are you talking about the new book?"
"She thought it was all message and no magic."
"Shall I look at it again and see what I think?"
"It's your book."
"It'll keep me company when the children are in bed. Must go now before dinner gets cold. Drive carefully on Saturday but don't be too late, will you? I love you." The silence closed in so immediately that he thought she'd gone, but as he murmured "I love you" he heard her last words to him. "It's colder when you're not here," she said.
TWENTY-NINE
"It's colder when you're not here," Ellen said, and kissed the chilly mouthpiece. "Here you are, Johnny, if you want to say hello."
The boy ran out of the dining-room, brandishing a handful of the cutlery he was placing on the table, and she took the dessert spoons from him to distribute them herself. She was touched and amused by how carefully he'd set the table; he'd already placed the knives and forks, and the settings on the round table were exactly equidistant, or as near to it as her eyes could judge. Children and their rituals, she thought, smiling. She closed the heavy floor-length curtains, shutting out the lights of Stargrave. "Hurry up with those plates, Peg," she called.
By the time Margaret had brought the plates and Ellen had ladled beef in red wine out of the casserole, Johnny was saying goodbye to his father. "Daddy says it hasn't snowed much there," he told them as he wriggled onto his chair. "When are we going to have more snow?"
"Johnny would like it to snow in his room," Margaret said.
"I would not," Johnny said indignantly, then admitted "Actually, I wouldn't mind."
"You'd feel it kiss you to sleep."
"That'd be good."
"It would feel like the heaviest blanket in the world," Ellen put in.
"It'd be so cold you wouldn't know you were."
"You'd be able to have snowmen around your bed," Johnny said. "If you woke up in the night you'd see them all there."
Ellen was unable to find that idea appealing; indeed, it made her shiver. After dinner, as she carried casserole and plates into the kitchen, she noticed snow in the air beyond the window, motes dancing in a wind which hissed down from the forest.
"You've made it snow, Johnny," she was about to call, but the thinness of the snow would only disappoint him. Besides, she found the sight of the faint icy auras sparkling around the snow figures oddly disturbing. She let the blind down and lifted the apple pie out of the oven, and felt grateful for its warmth.
Johnny saw off more than half the pie. Feeding him was like feeding a black hole, she often told him. The children were helping her at the sink when she said "Would you like me to read you the new book?"
"Yes please," Johnny cried, but Margaret hesitated. "Won't Daddy mind?" she said.
"I'm sure he'd want to hear what you think of it," Ellen said, and fetched the typescript from the workroom. Snow, or the imminence of it, whispered at the windows of the darkened rooms. As she crossed to the desk, a wind so large and cold it felt like a breath of the forest came to meet her at the window. Despite the wind, the trees appeared to be quite still. She thought the forest resembled an immense insect, its body hidden under a glimmering carapace and supported by countless thousands of legs. For a moment she imagined it moving all at once, but how would it move or change? "Just you stay where you are," she told it with a nervous giggle at herself.
The children snuggled against her legs while she sat on the front-room sofa and read The Lady Of The Heights aloud. Ben had joked about writing a version Alice Carroll would find acceptable, but it seemed to Ellen that he'd forgotten he had been joking; the more she read, the more the book read like a handbook for young climbers, a collection of do's and mostly don'ts rather thinly disguised as fiction. As for the spirit who saved climbers lost on the heights, she never quite came to life, and each reappearance of her made Ellen feel sadder. "And they lived happily for a while," she read at last, the spirit having fallen in love with a mortal and set up house with him where they could keep an eye on inexperienced climbers. She let the last page fall face down beside her on the sofa. "Is that the end?" Johnny said.
"Shouldn't it be?"
"S'pose so," Johnny said, clearly dissatisfied.
"So what did you think of the rest of it?"
"Good," Johnny said, so automatically that he contradicted himself.
"I don't think it'll mean as much to anyone but us," Margaret said.
That seemed so perceptive it stayed in Ellen's mind after she had put the children to bed. Rather than feel cold and lonely at the workroom desk she took the typescript to the dining-table and read through it again. Before long she found herself visualising the lady of the heights: eyes grey and bright as sunlit slate, pale skin smooth as untrodden snow, a long dress which looked intricately woven out of heather but which didn't hinder her barefoot climbing. She thought of sketching the images, but scribbled them down instead for Ben to consider, together with a few ideas for bringing the character alive in prose. That done, she felt ready for bed.
She bolted the front door and locked the mortise-lock, though none of that seemed necessary in Stargrave, and checked the downstairs windows and the back door. As she switched off the kitchen light she heard a thin whisper of snow beyond the blind. When she glanced out of Johnny's window, however, the air above the moors was clear. She gave the sleeping children each a kiss and brushed back Margaret's hair from her forehead which was frowning at a dream.
It took her a while to get warm under the duvet, and by then she was almost asleep. Perhaps that was why her dreams were cold, though they hardly seemed like hers at all. The only familiar image, which they kept repeating like a refrain, was Sterling Forest, crouching beneath its white shell. Beyond it and around it was icy blackness. If she didn't go into the forest she would have to venture under the bridge or into the unlit town, but she was afraid to move in any direction until she had determined where the whispering was coming from, or what the vast thin voice was saying from its throat which might be as wide as the sky – so afraid that she started awake.
That wasn't the kind of dream to waken from alone in the dark. Nevertheless she relaxed almost at once, because Ben was home. She hoped he wouldn't leave the front door open long; an icy draught was reaching all the way up to her. She was awaiting the slam of the front door when she wakened enough to realise that he couldn't have let himself into the house. Both the front and back doors were bolted on the inside.
She had just imagined he was there because she needed comforting, she told herself. She was all right now, the dream had gone away. But so had the last of her sleepiness, yet the impression which had greeted her as she awoke was growing. She was sure that she and the children were no longer alone in the house.
The thought of the sleeping children jerked her out of bed. She grabbed her dressing-gown from the duvet, where she'd spread it for extra warmth. She dug her fists into the sleeves and tied it around her as she padded shivering to the door. She closed one hand around the doorknob, which felt like a sculpted lump of ice, and snatched the door open. A white blur the size of her head rose out of the dark in front of her face.
It was her breath. The landing was so much colder than her room that she couldn't help flinching. The cold seemed to bring the darkness alive below her, a solid icy mass waiting for her to touch it unawares. She'd left the bedroom light turned off, but now she fumbled for the switch on the landing wall and pressed it, holding her breath to keep down the cry she was suddenly afraid she would have good cause to utter.